Does anyone have any good suggestions that I could bring up for the next meeting of my international book club? The last book we read was a looping polemic that turned out to have been chosen solely so that the libertarians in the club could use it as a jumping off point to spread their gospel. The next book is Niall Ferguson's "The West and the Rest", and I can already tell that I won't like it. I desperately need to be equipped with a good suggestion the next time around. We want some more women to attend the book club so ideally it would be a book that would attract some more women. I am thinking of Nicholas Kristoff's 'Half the Sky' but I wonder if that is too explicitly feminist. Another book that I like is Mara Hvistendahl's 'Unnatural Selection'.

But to fill the time in between, I think I will rent one of Pat Buchanans many books from the library.

Or you could, you know, read something good.

I could always read 50 Shades of Gray when my mom is done with it.

"Don't knock Fifty shades," I said, as I cocked my head to the right and bit my lip. I was turning eighteen shades of blush. I took a sip of my favorite English Twinnings tea and thought about my next flight to Seattle.

"From the mercantile monopolies of seventeenth-century empires to the modern-day authority of the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, the nations of the world have struggled to effectively harness globalization's promise. The economic narratives that underpinned these eras—the gold standard, the Bretton Woods regime, the "Washington Consensus"—brought great success and great failure. In this eloquent challenge to the reigning wisdom on globalization, Dani Rodrik offers a new narrative, one that embraces an ineluctable tension: we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national self-determination, and economic globalization. When the social arrangements of democracies inevitably clash with the international demands of globalization, national priorities should take precedence. Combining history with insight, humor with good-natured critique, Rodrik's case for a customizable globalization supported by a light frame of international rules shows the way to a balanced prosperity as we confront today's global challenges in trade, finance, and labor markets."

It's rather long and detailed, but I've found it to be the definitive account of what happened, with a good mix of gut-wrenching personal stories as well as the national politics / personalities that drove everything. The biggest mysteries to me were 'why did Mao have to start this when he was already the paramount leader- what was his motivation?' and 'why did people blindly worship this man so much?' and 'didn't they realize what was happening?' and this book helped me answer these questions and more. At the end it is self-evident why China turned away from communism already immediately after Mao's death. As a supplement I have 'Liu Shaoqi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution' by Lowell Dittmer.

The Triumph of Christianity by Rodney Stark. Let's see... there's a bizarre chapter in the middle of the book where he goes off on an extended polemic against Islam and insisting the the Crusades were "justified", and that "no apologies are necessary" even though he acknowledges that the population of Jerusalem was massacred after its fall. The chapter is literally subtitled "the case for the Crusades."

Then there's the fact that by use of scare quotes, he implies that he thinks the Spanish Inquisitors were more enlightened than Enlightenment writers such as Voltaire.

There's the part where Stark states that, if you take all of the world's Christians and except that you assume there are no Christians in China, then Christians are about 33 percent of the world's population. Later, he calculates the number of Christians in China at about 65 million. However, in the next section, he asserts that Christians are 40 percent of the world's population. By his own account, this cannot be correct. The flap of the book also asserts that Christians are "40 percent" of the world's population, without mentioning that this figure can only be arrived at by excluding China's 1.3 billion people from the world population.

Much of the book is spent on angrily denouncing and seemingly settling old scores with academic opponents, some of whom died over 100 years ago.

One person is accused of having said something wrong during the French Revolution, even though the parentheses that appear next to his name in the same paragraph indicated that he died in 1784.

Social scientists' propensity to occasionally jump to conclusions in the face of poor historical evidence is singled out for denunciation repeatedly; Stark then proceeds to jump to conclusions in the face of poor historical evidence repeatedly.

Nonetheless, the book is highly recommended. Hidden behind the offensive parts, the obvious political agenda, poor reasoning and juvenile language is the bringing together of a number of actually quite well researched arguments, presenting convincingly. Stark, of course, is a distinguished professor who at least is familiar with an impressive array of experts and studies which he cites copiously. The book tackles central topics in the history of Christianity and through its citations and tables produces convincing and non-obvious arguments about each one. Stark thoroughly attacks the secularization theory, which asserts that the trend towards greater secularization is inevitable.